Tuesday, March 28, 2017

The overwhelming majority of a software system’s lifespan is spent in use, not in design or implementation. So, why does conventional wisdom insist that software engineers focus primarily on the design and development of large-scale computing systems? -- the book tagline

A Site Reliability Engineer is a software engineer (in the developer sense) that designs and implement systems that automated what would otherwise be done manually by system administrators. As such, SREs have a directive for employing a minimum 50% of their time in development rather than firefighting and maintenance of existing servers (named toil in the book).

The book really is a collection of chapters, so you don't have to be scared by its size as you don't necessarily need to read it cover to cover. You can instead zoom in on the interesting chapters, being them monitoring, alerting, outage tracking or even management practices.

Principles, not just tools

I like books that reify and give names to concepts and principles, so that we can talk about those concepts and refer to them. This book gives precise definitions for the Google version of measures such as availability, Service Level Objectives and error budgets.
This is abstraction at work: even if the examples being used show Google specific tools like Borgmon or Outalator, the solutions are described at an higher abstraction level that makes them reusable. When load balancing practices are made generic enough to satisfy all of Google services, you can bet that they are reusable enough to be somewhat applicable to your situation.

Caveat emptor

Chances are that you're not Google: the size of your software development effort is order of magnitudes smaller, and even when it is of a comparable size it's not easy to turn an established organization into Google (and probably not desirable nor necessary.)However, you can understand that Google and the other giants like Facebook and Amazon are shaping our industry through their economically irresistible software and services. Angular vs React is actually Google vs Facebook; containers vs serverless is actually Kubernetes vs Lambda which is actually Google vs Amazon. The NoSQL revolution was probably started by the BigTable and Dynamo papers... and so on: when you deployed your first Docker container, Google engineers had already been using similar technology for 10 years; as such, they can teach you a lot at a relatively little cost through the pages of a book. And it's better to be informed on what may come to a cloud provider near you in the next years.

Conclusions

It took some time to get through this book, but it gives a realistic picture of running systems that undergo a large scale of traffic and changes at the same time. Besides the lessons you can directly get from it, I would recommend it to many system administrators and "devops guys" as a way to think more clearly about which forces and solutions are at play in their datacenters (or more likely, virtual private clouds).

Sunday, March 12, 2017

In 2016 I moved to another country and as a result of this change I didn't had much time to develop Eris further. Thankfully Eris 0.8 was already pretty much stable, and in this last period I could pick up development again.

What's new?

The ChangeLog for 0.9 contains one big new feature, multiple shrinking. While minimization of failing test cases is usually performed with a single linear search, multiple shrinking features a series of different options for shrinking a value.
For example, the integer 1234 was usually shrunk to 1233, 1232, 1231 and so on. With multiple shrinking, there are a series of options to explore that make the search logarithmic, such as 617, 925, 1080, 1157, 1195, 1214, 1224, 1129, and 1231. If the simplest failing values is below 617 for example, at least (1234-617) runs of the test will be skipped by this optimization, just in the first step.
This feature is the equivalent of QuickCheck's (and other property-based testing libraries') Rose Trees, but implemented here with an object-oriented approach that makes use of `GeneratedValueSingle` and `GeneratedValueOptions` as part of a Composite pattern.

This release also features support for the latest versions of basic dependencies:

PHPUnit 6.x is now supported

PHP 7.1 is officially supported (I expect there were mostly no issues in previous releases, but not the test suite fully passes.)

Several small bugs were fixed as part of feedback from projects using Eris:

the pos() and neg() generators should not shrink to 0.

float generation should never divide by 0.

shrinking of dates fell into a case of wrong operator precedence.

reproducible PHPUnit commands were not escaped correctly in presence of namespaced classes.

A few backward compatibility fixes were necessary to make room for new features:

minimumEvaluationRatio is now a method to be called, not a private field.

GeneratedValue is now an interface and not a class. This is supposed to be an internal value: project code should never depend on it and it should build custom generators with map() and other composite generators rather than implementing the Generator interface, which is much more complex.

the Listener::endPropertyVerification() method now takes the additional parameters $iterations and the optional $exception. When creating listeners should always subclass EmptyListener in order not to have to modify the not implemented methods, which will be inherited.

What's next?

My Trello board says:

still decoupling from PHPUnit, for usage in scripts, mainly as a programmable source of randomness.

more advanced Generators for finite state machines and in general a more stateful approach, for testing stateful systems.

faster feedback for developers, like having the option to run fewer test cases in a development environment but the full set in Continuous Integration.

I'm considering opening up the Trello board for public read-only visibility, as there's nothing sensible in there, but potential value in transparency and feedback from the random people encountering the project for the first time.

As always, if you feel there is a glaring feature missing in Eris, feel free to request it on the Github's project issues.